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Valdis Kl=?utf-8?Q?=c4=93?=tnieks valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu
Tue Nov 19 15:20:07 EST 2019


On Tue, 19 Nov 2019 17:03:37 +0530, Akash Sarda said:
> Hi,
>
> My name is Akash, and I want to start with OS development..
> I am interested in memory management, and would like to know if anyone
> has a newbie project in their mind..

Unfortunately, there's probably not much good newbie work in memory management,
because a whole lot of experts have already gone over it and make it work
reasonably well on *literally* everything from light bulbs to supercomputers.

I'm not saying there's nothing in there for a newbie to do. There's probably
still tons of minor enhancements that can be done, but they're going to require
that you actually understand the code at a fairly deep level. For example,
here's a recent commit:

commit abc04c84ae77fdbce2c42c52e4059d327e54c7ab
Author: Minchan Kim <minchan at google.com>
Date:   Wed Nov 6 16:06:48 2019 +1100

    mm/page_io.c: annotate refault stalls from swap_readpage

    If a block device supports rw_page operation, it doesn't submit bios so
    the annotation in submit_bio() for refault stall doesn't work.  It happens
    with zram in android, especially swap read path which could consume CPU
    cycle for decompress.  It is also a problem for zswap which uses
    frontswap.

    Annotate swap_readpage() to account the synchronous IO overhead to prevent
    underreport memory pressure.

The description of what was changed and why runs to just under 500 characters,
while the actual change is well under 200.

I'm assuming you've already cloned either Linus's git tree or one or more of
the development trees.   If so, you can do a 'git log mm/' and see what work
has been recently done, so you know what sort of learning curve you're
going to have.

You definitely need to read the various files under Documentation/process
and you probably should go read this as well:

https://lists.kernelnewbies.org/pipermail/kernelnewbies/2017-April/017765.html
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